Motorola's new Signature 27 has it all if you can stomach the $1,600 price tag

Motorola is patching a hole in its US lineup with a non-folding flagship phone, but the pricing puts this device dangerously close to the company’s expensive tablet-style foldable. The long-rumored Motorola Signature 27 is real, featuring top-of-the-line specs, a super-bright OLED screen, and a ton of cameras. But all this high-end hardware won’t come cheap in the age of AI. Motorola’s new flagship smartphone will run a whopping $1,600 when it arrives later this month.

The Signature 27 is a new take on flagship smartphones from Motorola, leaving behind the middling legacy of the Edge series. However, you’ll still immediately clock this as a Motorola device due to its distinctive use of materials and Pantone colors. The phone is metal, ceramic, and glass, but the backs are textured polycarbonate. The device comes in Coal Smoke (black) or Capulet Olive (green) colors. The former has a “tactical weave” finish inspired by automotive design, and the latter is “textile-inspired.”

This device will include the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6, the most powerful mobile chip Qualcomm offers right now. While some smartphones have flirted with 16GB of memory, that’s less common these days. The Signature 27 will have 12GB like Samsung’s base model flagships. However, there’s not going to be an upgrade option for more. You will, however, get a generous 512GB of storage.

The phone is fairly thin in most places, but it tapers outward near the camera module. It’s easy to see why Moto needed a little more space up there with four image sensors. Note: That’s not four cameras. There are three standard cameras: a 50MP primary, a 50MP ultrawide, and a 200MP 3x optical zoom (100x digital zoom). Joining the cameras is an event-based vision sensor (EVS) to power a feature called Action Shot.

The action sensor measures changes in light at a pixel level, which makes it ideal for tracking moving subjects. Action Shot will turn on automatically when the phone detects a lot of movement in the frame, but you can also activate it manually. Motorola’s cameras have long struggled to capture moving subjects clearly, so it’ll be interesting to see if the EVS fixes that.

If you’ve been thinking about a smaller phone, the Signature 27 isn’t for you. This phone sports a sizable 6.8-inch OLED screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. This is a tandem OLED panel, which uses stacked pixels to increase brightness. Moto claims the Signature 27 can hit an impressive 12,000 nits of peak brightness, which is four times higher than the iPhone 18 Pro Max (and the highest of any smartphone). A possible drawback is that tandem OLEDs tend to have a somewhat uneven appearance at low brightness with solid colors, but we haven’t seen the Signature 27 in person yet to say whether or not that’s the case here.

A display like that could really drain your battery, but the Signature 27 has capacity to spare. The 7,000 mAh silicon-carbon cell is the largest of any mainstream smartphone, 1,000 mAh larger than the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Motorola estimates it could last two days on a charge, and it won’t take long to refill. With a compatible USB-C charger (not included), the Signature 27 can reach speeds up to 90W. Moto claims up to 12 hours of usage in 12 minutes of charging.

You’ve got options

The Motorola Signature 27 will ship with Android 17 and Moto’s Hello UI customizations. The company promises seven years of OS updates, on par with Samsung and Google.

This will be a full Gemini Intelligence device, entitling it to Google’s most expansive list of AI features. Moto says the Signature 27 will get Google’s agentic app control, Create My Widget, Sign-to-Text, and Rambler voice input. However, these features will arrive “in the coming months,” as most of those features are still limited to Pixel phones.

Moto is still offering a parallel set of AI features on its phones. Features like Catch me up (notification summaries) and Pay Attention (meeting notes) are still supported, but the company appears to have dropped the Moto AI branding. Instead, these are all part of Motorola Qira, an AI platform that also connects your Motorola phone to Lenovo computers.

But what if you don’t want any of that? The Motorola Signature 27 will offer an uncharacteristic level of choice. This is the first Moto phone covered under its partnership with GrapheneOS. This privacy-focused OS is built on Android, but it doesn’t have Google apps or any of the tracking that comes with it.

Motorola does not intend to ship a version of the Signature 27 with GrapheneOS preloaded, so it’ll be up to buyers to install it. Details on that process will come at a later date, but it should be similar to Pixel phones—unlock the bootloader, flash the software, and enjoy.

Some months back, the Graphene team revealed the first device in its Moto collaboration would be priced above Pixels, and that certainly checks out. Motorola is asking $1,600 for the Signature 27, putting it above even the high-end flagship phones from Samsung and Apple. It’s also within $300 dollars of foldable phones like the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Motorola’s own Razr Fold (both $1,900 MSRP). Even the iPhone Duo is only $400 more than Moto’s new flagship slab.

Moto hasn’t announced any carrier partnerships yet. So you’ll have to buy the device directly from Motorola, Best Buy, or Amazon when it goes on sale on November 26. Preorders will be available starting November 19 if you are so inclined.

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